News from Brook Cottage farm this week .....
Turkeys
The two female turkeys (plus Dudley, of course) laid around 30 eggs and began to sit on them. So far we have only had two live hatchings with a large number of the eggs yet to hatch. I will leave them another few days and then if nothing has hatched I will have to take them away. The new poults are a wonderful new source of worry - last year I went to great lengths to ensure the day old poults I bought from Pat did not go anywhere near a blade of hay or straw (as I had been told, by pat, that poults do not do well on hay or straw bedding as they tend to eat too much of it and it can kill them). However, these poults are bedded on hay with their Mums. Argh. Seems ok so far but worry worry worry. Anyway, I have 25 poults on order from Pat, which will arrive on the 4 June. I'm not sure if our home breeding programme has been a huge success, but two poults are better than none.
PSU (Project Set Up)
Oh God. Where to start. Think of a huge number, then double it and you might be close to budgeted expenditure to date on PSU. Still, I have it all captured on an excel spreadsheet so even though the costs are spiralling, I know by exactly how much. So, with the budget, I am frightened, but knowledgeable!
We have made progress:
- the access track and parking area are now laid with crushed concrete - the final topping will be put down once the stables have been built and all the heavy lorries have finished coming onto the site
- the new hedge seems to be establishing ok (lots of water....)
- the guys have made a start digging out the manege and I have found a suitable surface that is IN BUDGET!! (about the only thing that is)
- we are getting close to deciding on our builder for the stables and yard
I am trying to get through all my riding instructor qualification preparation, but tine is tight so this is slow progress. I need to get up earlier in the morning, like 5am, and then I'd be fine.
Equines
Springtime and Lexi grazing in the new "summer grazing" field .......Karma
I found a fox cub's skull one day when picking up droppings from the field and I thoughtlessly tossed it onto the muck heap. A few weeks later we lost all our chickens to Mrs foxy - ...... next time I find a cub's skull I will treat it with more respect .......
Worming Sheep
The sheep needed a little tlc this month - they had to be wormed, given a heptavac injection and have anti fly strike spray put on them. In the absence of a sensible sheep dog (no, Jack does not count), any sheep pens or similar useful pieces of equipment, Sam and I coaxed the little sheepies with a bucket of feed and then grabbed them, one at a time, by the horns. I then straddled the sheep with my legs whilst clinging onto the horns and tried to hang on as it sort of broncho bucked for a while and then went still. Sam was then quick to put the wormed in the mouth, inject the heptavac and spray the bottom with spray. She only got me once with the anti fly strike spray :-)
We had done a couple, when we realised how similar the sheep actually look and that it would be extremely useful to mark each sheep - to identify those that had been "done" and those that hadn't. Again, in the absence of proper materials, I used a tube of Claudia's blue, washable paint (which incidentally, is not that washable, as it is still on the sheep some weeks later!). We either definitely did them all, or missed one and did one twice, but either way we were very pleased with ourselves for doing a good job.
xx
